Intel Corp (INTC)

[biosbob]

I have to correct you when you say ARM flushes to zero. It does not.

Though I am not an ARM floating point expert, I am pretty sure it is possible make am ARM processor flush to zero on floating point underflow. I also believe that an app can control the setting.

For VFP9 and VFP10, ARM has "full IEEE754 compliance with ARM support software, or near IEEE754 compliance with hardware only". I suspect the support software needed for full IEEE754 compliance causes a performance impact when underflow occurs or denormals are loaded from memory.